Founding Engineer (Full Stack)
Edinburgh · Office-based
Build the future of engineering software.
Nexal is building a next-generation engineering platform for process industries.
Engineering teams today work across disconnected drawings, calculations, schedules, specifications, standards and documents, spread across multiple applications. We're replacing that fragmented workflow with a connected platform where engineering information lives in one place and stays synchronised throughout the design process.
We're looking for an experienced full-stack engineer to become our first engineering hire and help build an enterprise-grade platform capable of secure, collaborative deployment at scale for some of the world's largest infrastructure organisations.
This isn't a feature development role. You'll be helping build the technical foundations of an entirely new engineering platform from the ground up.
It's an opportunity to work on genuinely difficult engineering problems that very few software companies get to solve - from collaborative engineering workflows and graph-based data models to enterprise architecture, CAD and BIM integration, intelligent automation and configurable engineering platforms.
The Role
You'll work closely with the founder to translate product concepts and customer requirements into scalable production software.
Product direction is driven through close collaboration with customers, rapid prototyping and continuous iteration. Your role is to design and build the systems that make those ideas secure, scalable and maintainable while contributing your own expertise on architecture, usability and technical implementation.
This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll spend your time designing, building and shipping software while helping establish the engineering foundations the company will scale upon.
You'll be responsible for
- Platform architecture
- Full-stack software development
- Backend architecture and APIs
- Frontend application development
- Engineering standards and best practices
- Security and permissions architecture
- Performance, scalability and reliability
- Technical implementation and architecture
- Helping shape the future engineering team
What you'll build
You'll work on challenges including:
- Scaling a collaborative multi-user engineering platform
- Designing secure and scalable data models
- Building modern frontend and backend systems
- Developing configurable engineering workflows
- Creating robust API architecture
- Integrating with CAD, BIM and enterprise engineering software
- Building a highly configurable platform that can be tailored to each customer's engineering standards, workflows and delivery processes
- Building our AI-driven standards onboarding engine, enabling customer engineering standards, templates and workflows to be onboarded rapidly across process industries
- Designing enterprise-grade security and permissions for critical infrastructure organisations
- Improving platform performance, reliability and maintainability
- Helping lay the foundations for future capabilities including engineering automation, drone surveys, automated 3D workflows and AI-assisted engineering
What we're looking for
We're looking for builders.
People who enjoy taking an idea from a whiteboard discussion to production software, working through ambiguity and solving technical problems that don't already have a defined solution.
You'll be comfortable working closely with the founder, translating product concepts into scalable software and helping shape how the platform is built.
Early-stage startup experience is strongly preferred. Whether you've been one of the first engineers in a startup or built your own product or company, you'll understand how to operate with autonomy, make pragmatic technical decisions and move quickly with minimal process.
You'll likely have:
- Strong full-stack software engineering experience
- Experience building and shipping production software
- Strong software architecture skills
- Strong experience with TypeScript, React and Next.js
- Experience designing and building APIs and backend services
- Experience working with PostgreSQL or another relational database
- Experience building cloud-native applications on AWS, Azure or GCP
- Experience designing authentication and authorisation systems
- Excellent problem-solving ability
- Strong communication skills
Nice to have:
- Experience building workflow platforms
- Experience integrating with CAD or BIM software
- Experience developing industrial or engineering software
- Experience building graph-based applications or data models
- Experience building collaborative or real-time applications
Location
This is an office-based role in Edinburgh.
During the early stages of the company, we're looking for someone who can work closely with the founder to enable rapid collaboration, technical discussions and product iteration.
Once established within the business, there will be flexibility to work from home one to two days per week.
Applicants must already have the right to work in the UK and either be based in, or be willing to relocate to, the Edinburgh area. Unfortunately, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.
What we offer
- competitive salary up to £80K, depending on experience
- Meaningful equity with significant long-term upside
- Workplace pension
- Modern city centre Edinburgh office
- Significant influence over the platform's technical architecture, engineering practices and future engineering culture
- The opportunity to build a category-defining engineering platform from the very beginning
- The opportunity to grow into technical leadership as the company scales, should that be a path you're interested in
- Freedom to solve genuinely challenging engineering problems alongside the founder